Merry Christmas, Kim Morgan!

Whose originality extends even to her choice of Christmas film to treasure and ponder--Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, a Christian allegory with a Jerry Lee Lewis growl.

There is no actor or man quite like Robert Mitchum. Brimming with understated talent (the kind that’s always underrated), the actor could run the spectrum from gorgeous leading man (Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison) to light comedian (What a Way to Go!) to war hero (The Story of G.I. Joe) to Western existentialist (Pursued) to flawed noir antihero (Out of the Past, Angel Face, Where Danger Lives) to aged gumshoe (Farewell My Lovely) to sexy psycho (Cape Fear) to hillbilly moonshiner (Thunder Road) and so much more, with nary a trace of effort. Though he was quoted as saying he sleepwalked through many of his roles (and that heavy-lidded, laconic demeanor was a large part of his barrel-chested appeal), he did work at some (or many) of his big-screen characters. Nowhere is this more evident than in one of the actor’s greatest and most terrifying roles -- as that demented preacher and scariest stepfather who ever lived, Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter.

Adapting Davis Grubb's novel (with film critic James Agee as screenwriter) into an expressionistic children's fairy tale/nightmare, Laughton not only directed a movie, but cast an elegiac spell over the audience with dreamlike, angled compositions (by cinematographer Stanley Cortez), chilling religious motifs, dark humor, disturbed perversity and pure horror. And casting Mitchum was just another of Laughton's ingenious moves -- the actor took viewers aback with his inspired, demonic weirdness, creating an unease that’s still palpable today.

That banshee screech he unleashes when Lillian Gish drives him off with her gun--like nothing every heard from human man, an inimitable stroke of acting genius.